Help! unmountable_boot_volume
 

Hi, a few problems over here! Well a blue screen comes up before I can do anything thats says I am reading this because of unmountable_boot_volume. the pc helpline ppl told me its my hard drive and I need to reformat it in DOS and reinstall windows XP. Tried pressing f8, but just get the same.

So, dont laugh me out of here, but how do I reformat my harddrive? And can a lay person like myself even do it.? Thanks=)


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Did you put your XP disc in and reboot your computer? Make sure your BIOS is set to read from the CD drive first and it should load up the XP Installer. You can do a format/install there.

Personally, whenever I see that message, I figure there was a serious problem on the harddrive that caused it, so to be safe, I just bought a new harddrive and started from there. If you reformat the current drive, you lose all the data, but if you add a new drive, SOMETIMES you can use the old drive as a slave, and can read and copy the old information. I mention this because I don't know how important the existing information on that drive is to you.

Yeah, i gotta agree with Deltona there. Just go get ya a new HDD. Storage is too cheap to worry about this kinda BS. I would say that these kind of error usually crop up when there is physical damage to the HDD, and that's just a precursor to a full-blown crash.

Good luck.

Thanks guys, a new one is on its way=)

your data should be safe, or reletively, when you get the new disk, install windows to it then add the old disk to the system and in, windows, run checkdisk, copy your files off if able, and RMA the bad disk.

If you have a laptop, your HDD could have popped out of place (by a millimeter). Our school laptops were like that in high school and meant to be replaced easily so when I dropped it (we had full insurance coverage) the HDD popped out a tiny bit and resulted in that message.

I would recheck all of your connections, even if you have a PC.

The first step I would suggest when receiving an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME message is to boot into your winxp recovery console and run "chkdsk /r". I've found that this can frequently fix the problem, though I also agree that it can indicate that your HD is failing. Use a tool like DFT or whatever came with your drive to run a thorough scan.

A friend of mine got that error and it turned out a virus deleted the boot.ini file. Restoring it using the WinXP cd fixed it.

For what it's worth, I had a similar error over the weekend on one of my home machines. I got that error, several black--not going to boot anything then, schmuck--screens and eventually it wouldn't move past the hard drive check during POST at all.

Two seperate problems and two seperate solutions, both of which have been mentioned here already.

First, I jarred the SATA line loose while I was cleaning a couple of noisy fans. An easy fix, but one I managed to overlook at first.
Second, The crappy, had it a while, slave drive I had used for the Vista Beta crapped out on me. A quick format of the drive, a few files deleted from the master drive and a repair of XP's MBR and things seemed to work fine for about a day. Last night during an install of Ubuntu, the drive made a horrible noise and finally died.

I encountered the same error message on a computer and decided to boot from the windows xp pro cd, enter the recovery console mode and used chkdsk/p and fixmbr. Once I performed these two commands, the operating system loaded, but was extremly sluggish.

I had to use Disk Defrag, Disk Cleanup, Spybot and Adaware and that eliminated the slow response time.

A friend of mine had his computer behave the way that's been posted. I took the hard drive, and managed to get, per his request, the "My Documents" folder (and all of his porn) off of it.

The hard drive is a little squirrelly--there are some files that will cause it to lock up if I try to copy them.

Anyway, the only remaining thing he'd like me to get off it is his Firefox bookmarks. Does anyone know a way to get them off a hard drive that's installed as a slave?

Thanks.

if the drive is 'squirly' dont use the internal IDE channels, get a USB to IDE adapter ($20) then if the drive craps out, unplug the usb, and replug it back in and your back running with out a reboot.

I just had something like that.

I've restored all my data now I think. It was a pain. Ultimately there was something wrong with the boot bits, but the OS and data was apparently fine because I've copied them twice (once as a partion copy, and once to FAT).